One Laptop Per Child News

I am A. Barrera of Fundación Tecnología para la Gente Panama. I believe that most people, specially socially and economically challenged groups, have the right to have all the things of modern life, beginning with drinking water, basic health care, affordable food and a strong education.

I also believe poor countries must be able to access technology and information, beginning with children, especially in countries with limited natural resources in which technology maybe one answer for economic growth instead of filling the limited space with mining, construction of foreign-owned resorts, land speculation, and rain forest devastation to sell wood and for biodiversity piracy - stealing nature produced biochemicals to patent expensive healing drugs.

OLPC in Panama

When I heard about One Laptop Per Child in a talk given by Nicholas Negroponte in Panama for a meeting of the Media Lab, I was working for Panama's Science and Technology Bureau as director of technology transfer. One of my achievements was to implement community Internet access centers so kids can access computers and Internet almost for free.

I tried then to convince Negroponte of letting Panama to participate and tried to convince my government, such as Ministry of Education, of getting involved under the coordination of the Bureau. Needless to say, it did not happen.

Panama's government changed 4 years ago. The new head of the Bureau introduced changes, and one of them was to explore the introduction of the OLPC but with very limited commitment. At the time of the first meeting Negroponte was asking for a million XOs commitment, and the limited capacity of Panama was not enticing.

Recent announcement of a firm commitment to have OLPC's in Panama by the end of the year, while announcing a visit from a representative of OLPC to Panama, raised suspicions, since the Minister of Education says now it will cost $14 million to implement the OLPC, a hefty tag. Not only that, but an offspring of the Bureau, an agency in charge of government innovation now said that the OLPC for Panama will require changes on its software.

This innovation agency has forced Panama's government in to use Microsoft exclusively for all its operations. They eliminated a non-exclusive agreement the former government signed with Microsoft, agreement I personally drafted. The former government's Bureau always advocated open source, which coincides with the OLPC foundation project, the current one is all Microsoft.

A political impact

The second problem I see is that the current government party is seeking reelection in lest than a year, and projects like OLPC can become a good political ticket support. In third world countries one key strategy to win votes is to show infrastructure stuff and tangible goods, such like dams, roads, bridges, even if they do not improve people's lives. The hurry by Panama's government to have the XOs is clearly looking more and more as a political move to win votes than an educational vision.

Panama's educational system is broke. The current S&T Bureau together with the innovation agency have tried to reform all with computers, for example, by using conceptual mapping software for all schools with no previous scientific research-based to support this, in order to solve the student learning problem, as they said.

The S&T Bureau chief is adviser to the US-based institution in charge of the concept mapping software and scheme, which raised more suspicions. Regardless of these efforts, the students' grade failure instead of diminishing, it keeps climbing to new highs every year. This happens as more foreign knowledge-based labour force is taking over the best paying jobs in Panama.

One day I commented to Negroponte and the OLPC staff via email that the XO, based on the acquisition and implementation scheme he has proposed (essentially a government top-down strategy), could become a political vote-seeking machine in the governmental party arsenal at the time of elections, instead of a long-range educational transformation tool.

That premonition is starting to become a menacing reality in Panama.

Related Links:

• One Laptop Per Panamanian Child
• Presidents Loving Laptops Doesn't Equal Ministers Buying XO's

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Tags: A. Barrera | Fundación Tecnología para la Gente | Microsoft | OLPC Panama | Science and Technology Bureau |

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As someone who has never done sales, tending a booth for One Laptop Per Child is a unique experience. While tending a booth has the downside of repetition and lulls in activity, the booth approach is great for the audience.

After all, the kitchen sink can be thrown at an audience in a presentation; but seeing is believing. Once people actually get to play on an XO, you'll have them hooked! Our setup was simple:

1. one 8 foot table;
2. three chairs on the opposite side with an XO for each "station";
3. two "floating" XOs for people coming around;
4. a 2' x 3' OLPC sign;
5. 35 XO handouts, which was not enough!

Considering the conference had over 100 people in attendance (largely decision makers), we had a total of over 40 visitors. Not a single person who visited simply picked up a handout and walked away: everyone stayed for at least a few minutes.

More importantly, everyone who came by and spent the time loved the little green machine: no one left disappointed. Also, we came away with several leads: people with concrete interests of getting these laptops into their schools. The XO is truly a great machine to demo.

As others have said in developer-speak, presently the XO hardware is "gold", the Activities are "beta", while the operating system is "alpha". What this means in the land of booths and demos: it passes the five minute credibility test with flying colors.

This is an essential first step, an ice breaker if you will, because no one will believe that the XO will work for them until they see if they can "break it". Once they try all the obvious things and it still works, they are then very impressed.

Best of all, they want to take the next step.

Brian Basgen is an active member of the Greater Arizona OLPC XO User Group and hopes you'll present OLPC in your community too.

Tags: Brian Basgen | Five Minute Credibility | OLPC Conference | One Laptop Per Child | XO Laptop Presentation |

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Its Khawaji again, and I just returned from a trip to rural Sudan with an XO laptop and I'd like to share my experience.

Baby Steps

The XO as an educational tool has so much potential, and puts such a vast horizon before children that one can't help but be excited, but the difficulty in realizing that potential lies in the first step.

How do children who have never seen anything remotely like a computer (in the case of these children probably not even a cell phone) react to this sort of thing? I was able to test that out briefly as I was in a very rural area last week, and was delighted to see that they took to it immediately.

There was a bit of impatience with the slow boot time, but within 15 minutes I could get them to record songs and videos of themselves. In this video, Abd ar-Raziq explains the process of how his family grows tobacco:

I also got them started typing a little bit with the word program (somewhat difficult since I don't have an Arabic XO - though it looks like the pootle translations for Arabic are done... anyone know how to install it?). After about a half an hour though, I was really scratching my head for something that they could pick up quickly and see the results of.

There really is not a lot of software on this machine that makes sense to a kid who has no prior exposure to electronics. Even the very concept of a drawing or icon on a screen being representative of an object in real life is pretty abstract and arbitrary (like the cars in etoys, for example).

Imagine if you didn't grow up surrounded by street signs and stick figures - it would not be intuitive that : ) represents (smiley face) which represents a human being expressing happiness. Or to pick an actual example from the sugar interface, that a 5-pointed decagon with three lines flowing from it represents a shooting star, which represents e-toys (the ultimate significance of which I have failed to grasp - does anyone else out there feel like e-toys is very strange?)

Maybe the demographic I am talking about here simply requires a different version of Sugar that is even more basic and user friendly (actually maybe that isn't a bad idea generally, that a student would graduate towards successively more advanced interfaces or OS').

OLPC without limits

The other major aspect that is important for kids to be able to really get into this is the ability to keep using it - if they are concerned about using up all the battery and not being able to charge it, they will never get past the first few steps because they will use it sparingly.

The XO will work as an educational tool best when it is not only ubiquitous, but always usable and deeply integrated into the child's daily life. Most of us who relied on computers only after we had completed most of our education probably thought of them as tools for specific purposes like word-processing, or formulating tables, or whatever, and only after quite a bit of technological development and re-learning began to realize their nearly limitless capabilities in many aspects of life.

If these kids start without that pre-conception of "computers are for doing such-and-such," and they have a tool that they can take everywhere, then they will probably open up new ways of using computers that we haven't even considered. And, more importantly they will learn at an alarming rate as they discover the world through the XO.

So how can they keep their XO powered up? Well, I am hoping that the human-powered machines are out there somewhere, but I don't have access to them, so I have done some brainstorming on my own. Electricity in developing countries is notoriously irregular, and often non-existent in more rural areas.

"I've got the power!"

But there is one widely available source of power at a constant voltage the entire world over. Can anyone guess? Car batteries!

I lived in a squatter settlement in western Africa for 2 years and all of my neighbors powered their televisions, lights, cell phone chargers, etc. with car batteries which they would take every week or two to the guy down the block who had real electricity and he recharged them for a small fee (I decided not to take the risk of burning down my shack).

It just so happened that I was setting up a Solar panel system on my recent rural trip, and the panels were set up to charge car batteries, so I had a chance to try it out myself. Unlike the Kenyan who commented on my last post, I did not have an inverter, though, and I had to be innovative.

I was not about to fry my XO, and I know very little about electricity, but the adapter on my green machine says that it converts to 12V, which is what a car battery produces. So I cut open the wire and spliced it to the cables coming directly from the car battery.

For anyone adventurous enough to try this at home, when you cut the green wire, it has an inner wire sealed in white [which is the negative, if I remember correctly] and this is surrounded by the positive wires twisted around.

This arrangement is the first non-hack-friendly aspect of the power supply, because it can be fairly difficult to separate them and strip the extremely fine silver wires without breaking or cutting them.

Everything seemed to be fine, so I slowly plugged in my unregulated wire configuration with great trepidation...and the light came on, followed by an extremely high-pitched noise (probably only audible to dogs and small children) that made me wonder if I should duck for cover, lest the battery explode.

Instead I unplugged it hoping I hadn't ruined anything, and after checking for any burning smell, I decided to try resplicing it going through a fuse which was connected to a light fixture in the solar panel system, since this also was supposed to be running at 12V. I again plugged it in and at first it actually seemed to work, but then the sound came back, I jiggled it around and it went away; then a minute or so later came back.

I thought I had enough juice to start the machine by this point, so I decided to just let it go, but it only got part way through the boot-up sequence before dying. I was getting concerned that the sound might have been caused by something moving at an extremely fast speed (though they claim it has "almost no moving parts") and I got worried it would lead to permanent damage, so I decided to try something else - rig up a car charger, like the kind you stick into the cigarette lighter.

I had brought one to charge my Thuraya satphone, for security purposes, and it gave a 10V output, which I thought would be too weak, but I figured at least it wouldn't break anything probably, so I respliced everything again, and tried this, and miraculously, it seemed to work, and was not making an apocalyptic screech.

I tried booting it up again, but again it crashed part way through the boot up sequence... after a couple tries I realized it was probably just because it was charging at too slow of a rate, so I made sure everything was completely off and left it to charge overnight, and in the morning I was at 100%! It booted up fine, and though it was losing power any time I actually used it, it would still charge when I closed it.

Lessons Learned

So the moral of the story is:

1. we really need to make the electric input on this thing more hackable, or at least more flexible
2. not all 12V were created equal - it was very smart of OLPC to not just choose a random voltage like 17.6, like most laptop manufacturers do, since car batteries are so ubiquitously available as a relatively stable voltage source.

   But they aren't actually 12 V, they run a little bit above that - usually between 13.2 and 12.6V depending on the level of charge. The laptop should be able to run off of this level of power without throwing people into epileptic fits and attracting every dog in town.

3. when do we get to try out the actual human-powered XO's?
4. can they do G1G1 for an expanded power pack (as a way to finance the new batteries that will be needed in extreme temperatures, as they are finding in Mongolia)?

Maybe next time I will write something about Pedagogy, OLPC, and the state of education in the Arabic-speaking world, based on the World Bank's new report on education in the Middle East

Khawaji is a NGO worker in Darfur and wrote about One Laptop Per Sudanese Child in January.

Tags: 12V | Arabic XO | Boot Up | Car Battery | Darfur | Khawaji | OLPC Sudan | Sudanese Child | Thuraya | XO Power | eToys |

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I've always wondered about the OLPC Peru mystery. How One laptop per Child was able to get such a quick uptake in Peru, a poor country with many problems?

Reading Nicholas Negroponte's interview with Fortune, I am starting to understand. Its all about personal connections!

In fact in 1991 a Peruvian educator [Oscar Becerra Tresierra] visited me at the MIT media lab and I introduced him to Seymour [Papert, the educational researcher who has been deeply involved in OLPC], and he was very taken with Seymour's theories.

So he went back and sent several people to the U.S. to study those theories. They went back to Peru in the early 90s, and this man who started that work has recently become the Minister of Education. And several of the people he sent to the US are in the ministry working with him.

Now its not all Negroponte's and Papert's disciples who are stoking the OLPC flame south of the Darien Gap. You also have Brightstar, the OLPC distributor, making its own personal connections.

Tags: Brightstar | Darien Gap | Marcelo Claure | Nicholas Negroponte | Oscar Becerra Tresierra | Seymour Papert |

OLPC in South America - A Personal Connection | Comment (36) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Please eXOnerate me if I eXude eXOrbitant eXuberance about my XO, but I have reason to believe that I should be happy as [probably] the first owner of an XO in Darfur.

I have been following the OLPC project for over 2 years now, while working in development-oriented NGO's across the Sahel, first converting to Ubuntu to gain greater familiarity with the Linux environment, and then vowing that my next computer would be from OLPC.

So I was not going to let the "available only for purchase in North America" clause keep from getting a little green machine, though it was delayed by a couple weeks as I waited for a reliable courier to hand deliver it, as I couldn't be sure about the international courier system.

I couldn't be more pleased with my XO, though I am probably the only XO within about 2000 km, which is a bit too far to mesh, even with this things clock stopping hot technology (so any re-gifters out there, feel free to facilitate some of my ideas for testing out mesh networking with Darfur's refugees and IDP's).

I was disappointed to hear that the G1G1 laptops wouldn't have alternative power sources, but I will have to find my own solution for that next week when I go out into a rural area - I am thinking solar power should do it. The next challenge will be to figure out whether I can get the Thuraya satphone GmPRS service to connect me to the internet when I am in the middle of nowhere.

Tags: Darfur | International Development | Khawaji | OLPC | OLPC Sudan | Refugees | Sahel | Ubuntu | XO Laptop |

One Laptop Per Sudanese Child in Darfur | Comment (8) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Joanna Stern at Laptop magazine just interviewed Nicholas Negroponte about the future of Give One Get One, the popular XO laptop donation plan from One Laptop Per Child.

The news? It looks like G1G1 will continue, just not in North America:

LAPTOP MAG: Many people don’t want to see Give 1, Get 1 end. Will a program like this ever be available again?

Nicholas Negroponte: We are exploring two parallel routes. One is doing a Give One or Give Many for diaspora of specific countries - Ethiopia and Iran immediately. The other is doing a Give 1, Get 1 in specific countries: Italy and UK are in discussion. As for in the USA, maybe next Christmas.

Now I wonder why those four countries - they are an odd mix. I can see OLPC wanting to build on Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi commitment of 50,000 laptops for Ethiopia with a G1G1 for purchases in Rome and donation in Addis Ababa, but what's the Iranian or UK angle?

Tags: Diaspora | G1G1 | Joanna Stern | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC Ethiopia | OLPC Iran | OLPC Italy | Romano Prodi |

G1G1 Success Equals G1G1 for Ethiopia, Iran, Italy and UK? | Comment (8) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Now that One Laptop Per Child has started Give One Get One XO sales, its time to revisit the cost of the XO-1 laptop. According to OLPC, its $200 just for the laptop, if you buy at least 10,000. Now that doesn't even come close to the Total Cost of Ownership, which is upwards of $1,000 per laptop when implementation and maintenance costs are added in.

But for argument's sake, let's go back to the base $200 laptop price. And let's take Sumner Lemon's example of Indonesia, one of the world's largest developing countries with a population of 235 million:

Indonesia has around 40 million students and buying all of them a laptop priced at $200 would cost $8 billion, a sum that is 3.3 times larger than the money set aside for Indonesia's mandatory 12-year education program in the government's 2007 budget.

Now Indonesia is not alone in facing astronomical laptop costs when looking at a one-to-one distribution model when barely having a budget for current educational expenditures. So how can there be one learning laptop per child in such a populous country?

On this, I suggest that OLPC look to the wisdom of Intel's World Ahead program staff. Leighton Phillips, manager of Intel's World Ahead Program in Asia, introduced a simple, but effective idea to Sumner:

One possible solution is a monthly payment program where parents pay for subsidized laptops in installments over the school year. But families in developing countries are generally poorer than in other countries-- Indonesia's 2006 per-capita GDP was $3,900 compared to $43,800 in the U.S.-- and that calls for creative financing programs to cover the cost of the computers.

"There are potential subsidies and there are different ways this is happening; some of it can be government-led, some of it can be corporate-led," Phillips said. With subsidized laptop programs, families could be asked to pay $10 per month in addition to existing tuition fees and receive a computer.

Or imagine an alternate Give One Get One program. A global G25%G1 if you will, where relatively wealthy buyers of XO-1 laptops in the developed world pay a 25% mark-up on $200 laptops, with that $50 premium going to subsidize an Indonesian family's purchase of an XO on a payment plan.

Tags: G1G1 | Humpty Dumpty | Intel | Leighton Phillips | OLPC Indonesia | Sumner Lemon | World Ahead | XO Payment Plan |

One Indonesian Laptop Payment Plan Per Family | Comment (12) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Brazil has officially opened a request for proposals for 150,000 "educational laptops" for it's Um Computador por Aluno project (One Computer per Student, in Portuguese) and OLPC looks to be the preferred candidate.

Brazil's Laptop RFP

As the law mandates, the RFP is open for anyone to bid in, but the way the official solicitation is written it becomes clear they already have a winner in mind. The bidding demands that the laptops must have:

• A gnu-linux operation system
• A video camera, microphone and audio output
• Support any temperature between 5 and 41 degrees Celsius
• A screen at least 7 inches, a minimum 800x600 pixel, not too much reflective on highly bright areas and have a high contrast in dark places
• And the ability to mesh network with one another

If that does not fit the XO laptop description enough, the final winner will be chosen based on who comes with the lowest price. Proposals will be accepted between December 18-20 so if Intel wants to be in the game they have no more than a week to have a serious update on their screen and a mesh network capability.

Tags: Brazil RFP | OLPC Brazil | OLPC Uruguay | Porto Alegre | Um Computador por Aluno | XO Laptop Order |

Brazil Requests 150,000 Um Computador por Aluno Laptops | Comment (14) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Two months ago UNDP started a project with One Laptop Per Child in Macedonia. Two classrooms were set up with 25 laptops each in early September when the school year begun. The news about the project was made available to the public last week when a major newspaper printed a story about the project.

I am Novica Nakov of Free Software Macedonia and I visited OU "Vojdan Chernodrinski" that is one of the primary schools that have a OLPC classroom to see what's going on.

The kids that are using the XO laptops are in the second grade. They seemed very enthusiastic when I entered the classroom. They were chatting on the laptops and telling each other what they wrote to their friends. They had no obvious problems using the laptops although the interface is in English.

Some of them even explained to me what kind of things they do and how to use some of the software. As I understood, classes in mathematics and Macedonian language are held using the laptops. The children are allowed to take them home and do homework. As a part of the UNDP project and with cooperation from OLPC the teachers had gone through some training so they can apply adequate teaching methods using the laptop.

Tags: Free Software Macedonia | NComputing | Novica Nakov | OLPC Macedonia | UNDP | Vojdan Chernodrinski |

OLPC Macedonia Update at OU Vojdan Chernodrinski | Comment (12) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Today's Wall Street Journal front page has long article on One Laptop Per Child: A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions. In it, Steve Stecklow takes the position that a computer for the poor was stomped by tech giants:

I'd like to take the position that if OLPC is getting stomped (and I don't think its being "stomped" at all), its due to its own foolishness and arrogance, as much or more than any underhanded competition from Intel or Microsoft.

Tags: Give One Get One | Intel | Microsoft | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC | Wall Street Journal | Windows | XO Laptop | XO-1 |

WSJ: OLPC XO Laptop Threatened by Intel & Microsoft | Comment (24) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Today is the American holiday of Thanksgiving - a day we give thanks for the bounty in our lives. And today I give thanks to One Laptop Per Child for opening up Give One Get One XO laptop sales to the world.

Now you can G1G1 in Europe, Asia, Africa & Americas with a major F.A.Q. change:

If I live outside of the US or Canada, may I participate in Give One Get One?

Yes, but only if you provide a shipping address within the US or Canada. To participate, please call 1-949-608-2865. International calling charges will apply.

Geeks worldwide, you read that right, G1G1 is now global! Now everyone can participate in the geek dream of 2007: One Laptop Per Child XO-1 computer ownership regardless of country or currency.

And why did this change happen? OLPC might have their story already set, but I say G1G1 changed because Gabriel Morales's desire to have One Laptop Per Child XO-1 laptop for all children became a global issue that demanded attention.

Tags: G1G1 | G1G1 FAQ | G1G1 Global | Gabriel Morales | Give One Get One | OLPC Sales | XO Laptop | XO for All |

Giving Thanks for Give One Get One XO Laptops Going Global!! | Comment (4) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

We are in the most difficult phase of the OLPC project right now. The hardware and software development process was amazing. I have never been involved in anything so productive. But now that the initial design is done and production has started, we have begun the nerve-wracking wait for enough initial orders to sustain production and make OLPC a going concern.

Nicholas Negroponte has admitted that he was not clear enough on the difference between a handshake with a national leader and a signed contract. In most countries, the difference is an appropriation by the legislature. Every salesman has to learn this distinction early. When the customer says Yes, you might have about a 50% chance of the sale.

When all of the details have been hammered out, you might have a 90% chance. Even when the contract is signed, you don't necessarily have a sale. The customer can still tear up the contract or take you to court, in cases of fraud or major cross-cultural communication failure.

Tags: Cultural Sensitivity | G1G1 | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC Peru | OLPC Uruguay | Quanta | XO Orders |

It's Nail-Biting Time at OLPC, Waiting For XO-1 Orders | Comment (13) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Last week, Mayor-elect Larry Langford of Birmingham declared One Laptop Per Alabaman Child with a 15,000 XO laptop purchase. But reading the article a little deeper, I come to a sad conclusion.

I put this announcement in the sale league as other proclamations we've heard before, where Presidents loving laptops doesn’t mean Ministers buying XO's:

He said the laptops would cost about $3 million - about $200 each. Langford, whose inauguration is today, said the money will come from private sector donations as well as the city budget. "I have to get the City Council on the same page," he said. "We all have to go in and just say what we're going to do. There will be tough decisions."

City Council President Carole Smitherman said she has had some discussions with Langford about the laptops, but she needs more details. "If our children have access to computers and it costs about $200 per computer, that's a minimal amount to bring children and their parents that technology," Smitherman said. "I have to see where that fits with the totality of items that the mayor wants the council to sign off on."

It also seems that no matter Langford's progress on selling his idea to the city council, he will also have to sell it to OLPC, who gave him the usual non-committal response

Tags: Birmingham City Council | Carole Smitherman | Charbax | Larry Langford | OLPC Alabama | WinTel Conspiracy |

Is OLPC Alabama Real and Is WinTel to Blame If Not? | Comment (26) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

The recent pitch given by Negroponte at the Jesuits headquarters, might mean a lot more than just making the XO on a e-Bible reader. The Catholic News Service reported:

"Vatican officials, ambassadors to the Vatican, and representatives of the world's religious orders were among the more than 200 people attending an Oct. 29 conference highlighting the One Laptop Per Child initiative. The conference was sponsored by the communications office of Rome's Jesuit headquarters and two commissions of the international organization of superiors general of religious orders."

The connection should not be as unexpected as it might sound. The Jesuits have, since their inception, sponsored schools across the globe, and involved in missions in the poorest corners of the world. Religious orders have for long known that education is a key to the survival of their beliefs onto the next generation.

I am Alexandre Van de Sande, an interaction designer and a shameless OLPC fan-boy. And as an Agnostic raised inside an Augustinian School I can attest: it's about education first, Christianizing later. The age of Jesuits roaming the world converting natives is over, and "education first" is the only win-win strategy. Religion sponsored education has already graduated millions of children worldwide and for most part this does mean quality education with real science: the phenomena of creationism bogus infiltrating some north American conservative schools tends to be an exception to the rule, and one can only hope that it can be entirely left out of this debate.

Tags: Alexandre Van de Sande | Jesuit Education | Roman Catholic Church | Sugar UI | Vatican | XO e-Bible Reader |

Jesuits and OLPC Laptops: It's Education First, Religion Second | Comment (4) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I am Bill Singer, Project Director, E-Learning Vietnam Project, US-Vietnam Program. Bringing Education to rural Vietnam is part of the US-Vietnam Project charter. Providing laptops is a critical part of the Project and we are optimistic that the OLPC laptop will be part of our solution for delivering E-Learning.

Unfortunately, our initial experience with One Laptop Per Child where we attempted to order four laptops to evaluate as part of a 10,000 unit order revealed significant barriers in XO buying programs, order process and warranty and field service operations.

The following feedback is provided in order that One Laptop Per Child understands the US-Vietnam Project needs so the appropriate operating adjustments are made that enable a strong, effective working relationship.

Appropriate Buying Programs:
No one at OLPC had the time to deal with our 10,000 unit order and we were directed to the Give One Get One "G1G1" program. Simply put, G1G1 is not the approach appropriate for a large scale project like ours, which is to evaluate the actual OLPC laptop being manufactured today in order to insure that the laptop performs as advertised, and then and only then to make incremental purchases of 10,000 laptops for each phase of deployment.

Our request is for a buying program that anticipates this scenario. Current models for testing and phased purchases are a fairly standard approach to deployment in both private and public sector projects.

Tags: Bill Singer | Give One Get One | OLPC Delivery | OLPC G1G1 | Quanta Computer | US-Vietnam Program | XO Warranty |

US-Vietnam 10,000 XO Laptop Purchase Problems | Comment (29) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Whew, what a geek-fest at last night's OLPC News Meetup in Washington DC! With three OLPC XO's, a Asus Eee PC, a Sony eBook reader, an iPhone, and a whole smattering of laptops and even a Freeplay Weza, it was computing central at Washington DC's RFD.

And out of that experience, we have Martin Paraskevov's narrative of what happens when you give One Laptop Per Bulgarian Geeks:

First we tried the Sugar interface and the different applications available. We spent some time playing with the python interactive interpreter in Pippy at which point Mohammad found how to get to a linux prompt.

One would press CTRL-ALT-F1 except that there is no F1 but one should press the button where F1 sits. CTRL-ALT-F3 takes you back to X (again there is no F3). On the prompt the root login didn't require a password. The OLPC was running a ssh daemon and we tried to connect it to a Dell laptop running Ubuntu but for some reason we couldn't. Both, the OLPC and the laptop were seeing the same access point (identified as the Mesh network) but we wouldn't be able to connect to it or even ping it.

Thanks for organizing this. Even though it was a bit disappointing that we couldn't connect the OLPCs in the mesh it was a fun evening.

Sadly, not everyone is having a good time with One Laptop Per Child this week. High-powered and highly committed geeks who want to G1G1 from Europe to Australia are having major issues with the Give many customer interface. Just listen to Wayne Connolly's story of woe:

Tags: Asus Eee | François Schnell | G1G1 | Give Many | Martin Paraskevov | OLPC Meetup | Wayne Connolly | XO Distribution |

Geeks Love XO-1 Laptops Despite OLPC's Suicidal G1G1 Plan | Comment (17) |